Rube Goldberg

Rube is one of my heroes. Born over a hundred years ago, he had the foresight to see how technological complexity tends to increase to ridiculous and sometimes self-defeating proportions, and he had the artistic talent and good humor to allow us to poke fun at ourselves through his drawings. This picture is of a typical Rube Goldbergian "labor-saving" device: an automatic toothpaste dispenser.
As it happens, my day job is all about dreaming up ways to automate things in ways that are ideally both highly labor-saving and also reasonably reliable. But, at least once or twice a day someone comes to tell me that the toothpaste isn't coming out and I then spend painstaking hours figuring out that the weight isn't falling on the teeter-totter because the cuckoo isn't popping the balloon any more, or that the egg flew through the air as expected, but missed the frying pan. Or that the cat, finally realizing the mouse is fake, got bored and wandered off instead of pouncing on the lever that releases the trebuchet that hurls a banana at the trained monkey who slides two abacus beads to the left which debits your credit card and sends you an acknowledging email. It's like that, except that the reality is far more complex (though equally bizarre). For your amusement, here's a good one from someone with way too much time on his/her hands.